Um, ever heard of the long tail? I know a person who just got their first DVD player… This is NOT the beginning of the end of DVDs.

Across the street from my building… Thought it was a pipe bomb… Bomb dog smelled an odor… It probably was a section of pipe, seeing as the building immediately adjacent is a coal power plant staffed by people who have the titles like pipefitter, steamfitter, electrician, etc. And I wouldn't be surprised if it had solvent on it, and that's what the dog smelled. The real question is how it got in the van, but I bet someone just put it in there by accident. The movie "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels" has a great quote, applicable here: "Chill, Winston."

Guy Kawasaki's list of skills you really need to know out in the real world is a great one. He republished it, well worth the couple of minutes you'll spend reading it and nodding in agreement.

This is really cool. And it makes a lot of sense. Sailing faster than the wind is possible because, in a lot of cases, the wind isn't directly pushing the boat. The people calling these guys idiots should really not talk about things they don't understand.

I like Marc Farley's list of what 3PAR does well. I've known Marc for a few years now, and I hope Dell ends up with 3PAR, partly because that'll make it easy for me to buy their gear, partly because that'll be the third time Marc's employer gets bought out by them. :) Hehehe.

I officially propose we take away Microsoft's Borg status and give it to Google. They're evil, plain and simple.

"Sometimes data is wrong out of ignorance. Other times it's wrong because people make stuff up. I can understand the former, but why you would ever do the latter is beyond me." Money — NSF and other grants represent millions of dollars, and this guy just couldn't tolerate being wrong because it means someone might question him. Academics are no different than anybody else in seeking fame and fortune and power, they are just very rarely accountable to anybody. It's good that someone called this guy on it, because I'm sure Harvard was just going to try to bury it to preserve their own image.

The Sun appears to be influencing the radioactive decay of particles. Interesting, though I suspect it'll somehow be further proof that the Earth is 4000 years old and Creationists are correct.

This is easily the stupidest thing I've seen all week. Mandating biodiesel in something that shouldn't ever run is a great way to save the world, right? Idiot politicians. Shouldn't we be mandating biodiesel in things like cars, trucks, or trains?

Most notably: "It is a single-level cell (SLC) product with 34nm process geometry and Micron says its endurance is terrific: 3.5 petabytes can be written to the drive in total before it wears out, equivalent to writing 1.9TB/day continuously for five years." It was just a matter of time before the write cycle problem was dealt with.

Perhaps California has needs that are met better by Microsoft products. But I think this sums it up: "In the end, Google did not submit a final bid because it felt that it could not win in a contest where the state was crafting its requirements to fit what Microsoft would offer – and without a final bid from Google, the state has nothing to approve or reject." If they didn't submit a bid, even a flawed one, they were disqualified. End of story.

Don't tell me you didn't see this coming.

A) The Packet Pushers guys are great, and I quadrupled my knowledge of Cisco 10 Gbps gear during a short trip across Seattle with Ethan. B) They’re dead on about terminating SSL somewhere else and saving 40% of your load. It’s something that I’ve already added to my VMworld TA8102 presentation about performance tuning.

“However, sometimes you should support legacy systems that use other protocols for information exchange, for example, FTP.” Um, no, you should never support legacy systems using FTP. FTP needs to die. The 1980s called and wants their broken, backwards, insecure protocol back.

“What terrible business jargon do you need unsucked?” Awesome.

Holy crap.

Good luck to them — personally I think it would be wiser to start implementing anything you want to save from OpenSolaris in Linux instead of forking the project (I know, it's not a fork, whatever). Solaris is on its way to being dead, people, killed by Oracle. Start making plans to move on.

Kevin is always full of good ideas: "This year, IF you receive a bag or backpack that you just don’t want, please don’t throw it away, but instead take it home, go to the dollar store and fill the backpack with pencils, crayons, paper and erasers and donate it to your local school system."

Chris Siebenmann continues to have cogent blog entries about system administration. I have to agree with him — replacing a distribution package with your own is a very complex operation. I usually encourage app admins to just build from source if they can't use a distribution's software, because "./configure –prefix=/app/dir" is a heck of a lot easier than building a package.

Jeremy Zawodny (jeremy.zawodny.com) linked to this — I am definitely going to try this. Freakin' airport "$14.95 for one hour of service" portals suck. On the other hand, I'm making sure my own wireless networks aren't susceptible to this…

I love bonnie++ — not the most in-depth tool for storage benchmarking (iozone is better for comprehensive testing) but gives you a great idea of what your performance might look like. This is a good tip.

What I find interesting is the fact that GE actively was pirating this software. Not that I don't think for a second that MGE was an upstanding vendor, but I like that the ridiculous use of the DMCA has been curtailed a bit. Besides, vendors who use dongles should all be shot.

A tweet today complaining that VMware doesn't change SIDs led me to finding this again. Mark Russinovich talks about why duplicate SIDs aren't a big deal anymore, and why Sysinternals retired NewSID as a result. If you do Windows deployments (and who doesn't?) you should know this. You still might need to sysprep, but maybe you can get out of some work…

"On August 6, we will give away your choice of one of the following Microsoft software packages… To enter, just subscribe to our newsletter! We will send the entry URL and contest password in the next newsletter, to be mailed on July 29th!" Gestalt IT is the parent of the Tech Field Day series, and Stephen and crew are worthy of your attention, in my opinion. Sign up, and maybe win a prize!

Ah yes, the NSFW4 "Goatse" class trauma.

"But occasionally I get the best kind of email, and it makes it all worth it:"

FCoTR FTW again #TechFieldDay

FCoTR FTW! #techfieldday

Awesome. Hat tip to jwz for this one.

The flow chart for decision making, while NSFW for language, is a classic.

I was not aware that GBICs are not designed for a large number of insertions/removals, aka "mating cycles." Though it makes sense, the average GBIC in my environment sees 1 mating cycle in its life.

I love this photo.

Matt Simmons' tweet reminded me that these all-purpose knobs exist. I gave mine away a few years ago and miss it. They're all stainless steel, and if you press down on them it clicks. The driver lets you make the LED on the bottom pulsate.

Lawsuits, people. This photographer should be retaining a lawyer right now. In fact, he should have lawyers falling over themselves to help him, and just split the proceeds from the settlement.

I'm starting to really dislike the hipster word of the year: curated. That aside, these locked-down app store models also keep you free of malware, ensure that software will work on the device you have, and help deal with piracy, all of which are big problems on Android.

Sweet!

I like it! "If there’s one way you can really judge a job candidate’s true character, it is by determining their preference between Star Wars and Star Trek. Make sure that when you ask this question, you give no indication whatsoever which you prefer! Some interviewees will try to take a compromise position and say, “I like them both equally.” This is utter nonsense and the sign of an intellectual weakling who cannot make a decision."

"In other words, nothing about this video seems to imply Best Buy in anyway. In fact, the only reason it will be tied to Best Buy now is thanks to this story." Nice shot, idiots. Again, if you'd have left it alone you wouldn't look like fools. Also, the videos are funny as hell, definitely NSFW language.

Start looking at IPv6, people! Especially for your public-facing stuff.